violence or non-violence -- Gandhi on israel, Zionists, Holocaust, etc -- some history --

just part of this great and very eye-opening (in many ways) article --

... What then, according to Gandhi, were the Jews of Germany to do?

If someone with courage and vision can arise among them to lead them in non-violent action, the winter of their despair can in the twinkling of an eye be turned into the summer of hope. And what has today become a degrading manhunt can be turned into a calm and determined stand by unarmed men and women possessing the strength of suffering given to them by Jehovah […] The German Jews will score a lasting victory over the German gentiles in the sense that they will have converted the latter to an appreciation of human dignity.

Here Gandhi was applying his principle of satyagraha, (‘the force of truth’) to a European situation. Gandhi’s civil resistance campaigns in South Africa and India were based on this non-violent principle. In his view this principle was universally applicable; Germany’s Jews too could apply satyagraha. Gandhi’s claim that “the force of truth” is a universally applicable technique rests on this analysis: there is an element of truth in each side of a dispute. Conflict can be resolved through a process in which each side can see the kernel of truth in the other side’s position. Missing from Gandhi’s analysis: a scenario in which one side denies the possibility of dialogue and rests its claim on total force and the denial of the other.

In Gandhi’s view there were no exceptions to the power of satyagraha; if an exception was found, the principle would no longer be valid. His advice to the Jews of Germany was consistent with his views about the European Fascist regimes and their dictators. In his opinion, Mussolini and Hitler were susceptible to political and moral persuasion; all human beings, including the most violent and corrupt, can be healed and reformed. Gandhi also offered advice to those Jews living in Palestine:

They should seek to convert the Arab heart. The same God rules the Arab heart who rules the Jewish heart. They can offer satyagraha in front of the Arabs and offer themselves to be shot or thrown into the Dead Sea without raising a little finger against them… There are hundreds of ways of reasoning with the Arabs, if they will only discard the help of the British bayonet […] I am not defending the Arab excesses. I wish they had chosen the way of non-violence in resisting what they rightly regarded as an unwarrantable encroachment upon their country.

Later in December 1938, a month after Gandhi published his views on the Jews in Germany and the question of Palestine, he was questioned by visiting American Protestant clergymen about the German takeover of the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia. Gandhi counseled that the Czechs adopt a non-violent strategy. One clergyman said “you do not know Hitler and Mussolini. They are incapable of any moral response. They have no conscience, and they have made themselves impervious to world opinion. Would it not be playing into the hands of these dictators if, for instance, the Czechs, following your advice, confronted them with non-violence?” “Your argument”, Gandhi objected, presupposes that the dictators like Mussolini and Hitler are beyond redemption.” In Gandhi’s world-view all people have the potential for good. Any exceptions to this rule would, in Gandhi’s view undermine the concept and what he saw as its universal application.

A month later, in December of 1938, Gandhi answered critics of his Harijan article on Jews and satyagraha. Rejecting the claim that the Jewish tradition has always promoted a form of passive resistance in the face of oppression, Gandhi stated:

The Jews, so far as I know, have never practiced non-violence as an article of faith or even a deliberate policy. Indeed it is a stigma against them that their ancestors crucified Jesus. Are they not supposed to believe in ‘eye for an eye and tooth for tooth?’ Have they no violence in their hearts from their oppressors […] Their non-violence, if it may be so-called, is of the helpless and the weak.

In response to these statements in Harijan, Martin Buber wrote an open letter to Gandhi, a letter in which the German Jewish philosopher attempts to correct Gandhi’s misunderstandings of the Jewish tradition. For in those few sentences Gandhi had aligned himself with some of the Christian theological tradition’s most problematic assertions about Jews and their religion. In these phrases Gandhi had invoked two ancient and contentious Christian claims: that Jews were guilty of deicide—the murder of Jesus—and that the Old Testament, or Hebrew Bible, espoused a more primitive ethical order, calling for a system of law based on vengeance. ...

2 scholarly responses to the article very worth reading -- Two letters in response to "Gandhi, His Grandson, Israel, and the Jews" by Shalom Goldman, the first by Michael Nagler, founder of the Peace and Conflict Studies Program at U.C. Berkeley, the second by Ira Chernus, professor of religious studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder:

including this part, which goes to the usefulness and practical aims of anyone looking to Gandhi for inspiration or behaviorial model for any given situation that arises --

... It rests on the assumption that the test of Gandhi’s teaching is whether it would indeed get the oppressor to change his evil ways. That view, in turn, rests on the assumption that Gandhi wanted us to undertake campaigns of nonviolent resistance in order to do just that, to effect an immediate change in someone else’s behavior. Since neither of these assumptions is true, anti-Gandhian arguments based on them miss the force of the Mahatma’s teaching almost entirely. Yes, he did say that nonviolence would surely melt the stoniest heart — though no one could predict how long the process would take. Indeed, he said that nonviolence is the slowest method of creating change. Its countervailing virtue is that the change it produced toward peace and justice was sure to last. But even if this claim were proven false, it would not touch the heart of Gandhi’s teaching. Because, while he described the outcome of nonviolence in these terms, he never made the prospect of success his motive for nonviolent resistance.

On the contrary, over and over again, he very explicitly ruled out the hope for success as a valid motive, ...

-- no one should die for such a goal -- ever! -- esp when there are other ways to achieve it -- and it's besides the point to begin with.

The oppressors always see themselves as already having that appreciation.